BEFORE SHE died of a brain haemorrhage in 1990, the acclaimed playwright and screenwriter Andrea Dunbar toughed it out on Bradford's infamous Buttershaw estate, a grim environment that served as inspiration for her best-known works: Rita, Sue and Bob Too!and The Arbor. The latter, a Royal Court production named for the benighted street where she lived, was written when Dunbar was still 15.
As Clio Barnard's groundbreaking film has it, Dunbar's short, mad life was a prelude to an even greater tragedy. Pieced together from the painfully direct autobiography found in Dunbar's work and raw testimony from her damaged children, The Arborplays as taut, heartbreaking drama despite its avant-garde anatomy. Don't let the word "experimental" blind you to the possibilities. The director makes accessible, direct cinema from her novel format.
Returning to her subject’s old stomping ground, the film follows actors as they lip-sync to recorded verbal accounts of past traumas. The effect of this improbably brilliant innovation is both hypnotic and corsucating. The players seem to haunt the film in a manner than matches the experiences they recount, experiences that demand a certain level of disassociation.
The film finds a dramatic focus in Lorraine (an exceptional Manjinder Virk), Dunbar’s eldest daughter from a mixed-race relationship. The girl speaks of a childhood spent in inescapable rooms without door handles, listening to mummy write in the adjoining space.
For all mother’s artistic successes, life for the Dunbar kids seems to get progressively worse. In an eerily calm tone, Lorraine recalls brushes with sexual abuse, her own mother’s racism and a slow descent into prostitution and crack cocaine.
The film ought to be prurient; it ought to be unbearably miserable. It isn't on either count. The Arborcannily maintains a spooky tone and distance while forensically picking apart an intergenerational cycle of abuse and socioeconomic deprivation. There are awful things lurking here, but they are every bit as ghostly as the old TV footage of the teenage Dunbar.
Ultimately, The Arborcan't provide a happy ending, but it does find catharsis in its sadness. This is a rich film scored through with unspoken questions about poverty, drug abuse and the incongruities between domesticity and creativity. And yet what we do know for certain about the survivors is just that – they survived.
